Assignment
Continue assembling your worldbuilding collection of materials, speculations, and interpretive ideas, and critically and creatively connect what you learn in lectures to what you are interested in exploring in your upcoming research.
In the Fall quarter, you set up a website to house your Digital Archive, and you engaged with the texts and ideas presented by the lecturing faculty by collecting what sparked your interest and drawing connections to other media you selected or created. In the Winter quarter, the writing assignments and the lectures by Prof. Cooks, Prof. Robertson, and Prof. Wasserstrom will teach you to analyze visual and historical primary sources and to begin engaging with the interpretations of other scholars. While developing skills in source evaluation and multimodal presentation, you will to add to your growing Digital Archive journey further toward selection of your own research topic in the Spring.
Your additions to the Digital Archive this quarter, including all three Winter activities you complete, will be worth 20% of your writing grade. Keeping in mind that your audience, or “public,” this quarter is your seminar community, be sure to “publish” each time you add to or edit your site. You will share the link on the Canvas site for your seminar and also submit URLs for your assignment submissions.
Learning Goals
- Exhibit rhetorical awareness of purpose, audience, genre, and context in choices of style, multimedia, and textual and visual organization
- Engage critically and creatively with ideas learned in lecture, from course materials, and from related learning experiences
- Produce accurate, ethically responsible communication with citational practices appropriate to scholarly digital media
- Demonstrate information literacy skills by locating, evaluating, and integrating primary sources and secondary sources from institutional digital archives and databases
- Develop digital literacy and transferable technical skills through the design of a basic website
- Reflect critically on the experience of research, writing, and multimodal communication
Recommended Tools
I. UCI Google Sites within UCI Google Workspace (also known as Google Apps), easily shared with UCI users.
- For help, visit Google Sites Support. Keep in mind that it can be difficult to create a Google Site on a phone.
- Your UCI Google Site will be stored in your UCI Google Drive, which provides organizable storage for media files and documents. You can collect materials in your UCI Google Drive for easy embedding in pages of your UCI Google Site. You are strongly encouraged to draft and save your work in a document in your preferred software (Google docs, Word, etc.)
II. Whatever desktop or mobile apps you like using to capture, create, or edit media (photos, images, audio, or video). No special software will be required.
💡 Did you know? Some software is available to UCI students for free:
- Microsoft 365, including Office and OneDrive
- Adobe Creative Cloud, including Adobe Premiere Rush for video editing, Audition for audio editing, and Photoshop
- UCI Zoom, also useful for recording webcam video with or without screenshare
Digital Archive Activities
Note: Your instructor may adjust these activity instructions for the particular emphases of your seminar. This quarter, you are invited to compose your own title for each activity.
Digital Archive Activity 4
How do you engage in reading a scholarly secondary source? Taking advantage of the opportunities for multimodal presentation on a webpage, examine your reading practice and show others how you do it, using the example of one or more of the assigned book chapters written by art historian Bridget R. Cooks: the Humanities Core Handbook chapter “What’s Wrong with Museums? African American Artists Review Art History,” the academic book chapter “Back to the Future: The Quilts of Gee’s Bend,” or the exhibition catalog essay “Intricate Illusion.”
Who do you think is the audience for this scholarly work, and what features of the text reflect its rhetorical purpose? How do you identify the central scholarly claims made and key terminology used? What do you do when you encounter words or proper names you don’t recognize? How do you note the way the author analyzes primary sources, uses information from other scholarly sources, and responds to other scholars’ arguments or interpretations? Which references spark your interest in reading more?
Record and share your best strategies for reading secondary sources strategically: How do you make annotations? Do you use Google Drive or Adobe Acrobat or some other application? Do you print out the reading and mark it up? Do you write or type notes on a separate page or document? What do you annotate? In this demonstration, make use of visual communication as well as text, and be sure to include a full citation, in MLA format, of the excerpt. Keep in mind that posting an entire book chapter online would violate the author’s copyright! Be respectful of other scholars’ work, and select only short passages as illustrations.
Before submitting the URL for this assignment, be sure to “publish” the changes to your site, then copy the link, which should have the form https://sites.google.com/uci.edu/yoursitename/pagename.
Digital Archive Activity 5
Taking advantage of the multimodal potential of another page of your Digital Archive, explore and reflect on an exhibition using text, visual media, and responsible citations.
Visit the current exhibition on the ground floor of Langson Library, Anteater Spirit, and collect your observations on the items from the University Archives exhibited there. How is the exhibition organized, by whom, and for what purpose, do you think? Does it surprise you that these items, including ephemera such as flyers and posters, have been preserved for future study in the University Archives? Are there particular primary sources in this exhibition that you found interesting? What kinds of historical contextualization and other information about the items are presented? And what similarities or differences do you see between the activist history recorded here and the activist history you have started learning about in Prof. Robertson’s lectures? In what ways are the primary sources documents of worldbuilding?
Alternative for anyone temporarily unable to visit the library because of illness/quarantine: After talking with your instructor about your situation, visit the University Archives listings on the Online Archive of California. Write your impressions of the collections listed there, including the relative numbers of collections that have been digitized and collections that are available only as physical materials, not online. Can you find a digitized collection having to do with campus spaces or campus life? What kinds of media are included in that collection, and what is the purpose of preserving the items, do you think? Is there a particular primary source in the collection you find interesting in relation to acts of worldbuilding? (Try using the “Get Citation” tool on an individual item in order to cite the source responsibly.)
Before submitting the URL for this assignment, be sure to “publish” the changes to your site, then copy the link, which should have the form https://sites.google.com/uci.edu/yoursitename/pagename.
Digital Archive Activity 6
In the form of a three-to-five-minute video or audio recording, reflect on what you have collected and discovered in this Digital Archive these past two quarters–and on what you observe in your classmates’ websites. What ideas, insights, or even possible theories about worldbuilding do you sense emerging from your own collection and the websites of your classmates that you have perused? Prof. Wasserstrom’s lectures, building on those before his, have emphasized how primary sources from a wide range of genres and media can stimulate our interest in learning more about a particular context or topic. As you contemplate your own Spring research project, what might be a thought-provoking text, artwork, set of historical materials, film, or other cultural object to investigate in relation to the theme of worldbuilding? Think expansively about potential primary sources and topics that you find compelling, not just those that have been discussed in lectures.
To capture and edit a video recording or audio recording of your talking through your reflections, use whichever desktop or mobile apps you prefer. (If you’d like to learn a new app, you might try OBS Studio for media capture, Adobe Premiere Rush for video editing, or Adobe Audition for audio editing.) Note that you do not need to post your video on YouTube to share it; you can upload your file to your UCI Google Drive, make sure it is visible to UCI users, and then easily add it on a page of your Google Site. To add a video from your Google Drive, select “Insert” > “Drive,” find the video file you wish to insert, and click “Insert.” To add an audio file from your Google Drive, first get the share link from the audio file, then on the Google Site page, select “Embed,” enter the URL of the share link, and click “Insert.”
Before submitting this last Winter activity, be sure also to take a look at the homepage of your Digital Archive and update it to frame the expanded collection of activities for site visitors.
